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The Rush of Shipping
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7 min read
Recently, one of my posts made Hacker News #1. That brought back childhood memories. The Paidmail Site When I was thirteen, I launched a hacky Paidmail site. The concept was simple: You signed up to receive ad e-mails. At the end of the month, you got money in proportion to how many e-mails you had received. How…
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Don’t Be an Engineer, Be a Producer
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3 min read
I’m currently reading Range by David Epstein [1]. I was deeply impressed by the section about Gunpei Yokoi, the guy at Nintendo who was the driving force behind the NES and Game Boy. I have fond memories of the Game Boy; everyone who was a kid in the nineties does. This awesome thing you could hold in our hands,…
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Businesspeople Are Useless
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4 min read
Interacting with businesspeople never ceases to amaze me. They presume that they’re qualified to run companies. Why? Because they are businesspeople. What makes a good businessperson, anyway? There seems to be a factory-like process of creating “great” businesspeople: Take some random people with above-average self-confidence. Toss them into business school, teach them how to write…
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Zigbee-enabled light bulbs. Wifi-connected air purifiers. Autonomous thermostats. The smart home. Great technology. And just like with machine learning and blockchain, we humans don’t quite know yet what to do with it yet. Similar to those technologies, the smart home offers solutions for non-existent problems. Now I can control my light bulbs from an app…
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We need more Hackers
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6 min read
The Hacker’s First Project When I was a kid, I wanted to code my own website. I was already using Dreamweaver to crank out static HTML web pages but this was different. I needed to learn PHP to create a website which would earn passive income for the rest of my life. Very important! The…
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Making My Own Glasses
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12 min read
It’s a long weekend, I’m standing in my flat, 10 lenses scattered across the desk in front of me. I’m wearing weird glasses consisting of an empty plastic frame and some lenses stuck into it. I squint out of the window, trying to read number plates of cars parked in the street. What happened? It…
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Thread-safe queues in Clojure
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10 min read
Imagine the following: You have a pool of workers. Each worker should get an item from a queue and process it. Using “workers” from core.async Great! How do we launch those workers? Let’s use core.async for that, specifically go: By the way, core.async has a fixed-size thread pool of 8 workers, but that’s stuff for another post. Every time dotimes runs with…
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React less
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4 min read
Push vs. Pull notifications When my phone vibrates with a new notification, I react to it – I read it while thinking about it and sometimes type a reply. In a very broad sense, it’s a push notification: It’s pushed towards me without me seeking it and it triggers my reaction. How did people do this…
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The Correlation Project
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12 min read
As a coder, concentration and mental focus become very important. Writing code is a very brain-intense activity which makes daily fluctuations of mental focus very obvious. I already noticed this while studying medicine. Luckily, studying medicine is not an activity which requires a lot of brain activity (it’s more about being organised). When I started…
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Two Years of Sleep Optimization
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7 min read
As a kid, I became obsessed with my sleep. When I couldn’t fall asleep, I panicked – oh no, I’m not getting enough sleep for school tomorrow! As a good Asian kid, that thought was very scary. I would blame my bed, mattress or pillow of making too much noise or being uncomfortable. My parents…